As a personal trainer, knowing baby was on the cards at some point (sooner rather than later) I decided to do my pre and post natal training a few months back. Great for me when I did fall and great for potential clients.

From a PT perspective, to train the average pre/postnatal gym goer, the training was great. As a 2+ years CrossFit athlete, honestly I found the training pretty useless for training myself and other pregnant women through their CrossFit pregnancy! It was very much based on government guidelines; slow steady cardio and globo gym classes with a little bit of weight training thrown in.

When asked about high intensity training like CrossFit, Olympic lifting or powerlifting the trainer looked lost. Nothing against her, she knew her stuff otherwise and I didn’t really expect her to have an indepth knowledge of CrossFit, but I came away with no real knowledge of how I would train myself when the time came.

I started doing some research of my own and found a few women who kept training while pregnant. Lea-Ann Ellison and local Katja Harjanne made the news for CrossFitting while heavily pregnant, and have both since given birth to very healthy babies and look fantastic themselves! Body builder Jessie Hilgenberg has a great instagram account and Birthfit is full of pictures and videos of heavily pregnant women doing incredible things. CrossFitMom.com used to be fantastic help but has since been replaced by a page not hugely insightful.

The main comment I read while researching was ‘listen to your body’ which was all well and good.. But would I be able to translate what my body was saying? How do I tell the difference between a workout just being tough and my body saying you shouldn’t be doing this? Advice says not to overheat, but our box is a tin building and like a sauna the second the sun comes out.. Is that safe?

I understood the concept of working around a bump and scaling as the bump got in the way in the second and third trimester. But what about the first? The most dangerous trimester!? When one person says to take it easy and the other says keep going as normal until 20 weeks!?

My first doctors appointment was far from useful training wise. When I explained what CrossFit was (a combination of weightlifting, cardio and gymnastics – in a nutshell) her exact words were “well you’ll want to stop that and just do a bit of this” raising her arms over her head and out to the side in some 1970’s aerobic step class manner! Helpful!

So here I am, with the knowledge I have from training myself, PTing, self study and my pre and post natal course, but otherwise generally winging it and hoping I learn along the way, enough to actually provide some helpful information to ease the minds of fellow CrossFit Mum’s to be. I also hope blogging about my CrossFit pregnancy will help me with any further pregnancies of my own.

Pre-pregnancy check list:

Time crossfitting: 2 years

Bodyweight: 52-54kg

Sessions per week: 4-6 sessions, 1-2 hours.

1RMs:

Deadlift – 127.5kg

Back squat – 95kg (ish)

Front squat – 82.5kg

Strict press – 45kg

Push-press – 57.5

Clean and jerk – 70kg

Snatch – 42.5kg – Power 45kg

Overhead squat – 52.5kg

Weighted pull-up – bw + 24kg

Weighted dip – bw + 20kg

Fran time – 5.31

Grace time –

Isabel time – (shocking – but first time being able to RX it, at 42.5kg, my 1RM squat snatch!)

CrossFit Open 2015: top 6% in UK, top 8% in Europe, top 9% worldwide. CrossFit open 2016 will be approx 1 month postpartum.. We shall see!
Strengths: bodyweight, pistols, pull-ups, HSPU, clean and jerk.

Truth bomb: the clients I find most challenging are the serial yoyo dieters. That’s not to say it affects how I get on with them as a person, but they are harder work. A negative set of measurements, when I know my nutrition support has been ignored and traded for a shake, is as infuriating as it is upsetting. The same applies to those who refuse to change a thing nutritionally or do any training outside of our sessions but still expect the results.

– Yoyo dieters will take on extreme eating habits for relatively short periods of time, either repeating one diet over and over or working through a variety. –

Without going too deep into my dislike of ‘diets’ as a whole, most meal replacement diets work by dramatically reducing calories while pumping you full of diuretics, a substance that promoted the production of urine. This leads firstly to a large loss in water weight, followed (if you can stick it out long enough) by muscle mass and a little fat.

Serial yoyo dieters will start a diet, usually severely cutting calories, surviving off shakes or cutting out whole *vital food groups (protein or fats). Due to the nature of the diet the number on the scales drops dramatically. “This is amazing! It sucks, I’m tired, I can’t concentrate, and I’m starving, but look at the scales!!”

Once the bodies will to survive overrides the persons willpower they give up and binge, feeling horribly guilty, digested with themselves and miserable. How can you live a happy life weighed down like that?

If a yoyo dieter tries eating **whole nutritious food for a week or two they usually find the scales don’t budge, they may even go up a bit if also exercising! This doesn’t mean fat loss isn’t occurring, but the body is adjusting and will take time to start showing on the scales. Muscle is growing stronger and can balance out the fat loss on the scales to start with.

Examples..

Miss Client has lost 7lb over 2 months by training 3-5 times a week and changing her eating habits to whole nutritious food. She has dropped two dress sizes. Consistently, over a year, Miss Client would lose 3 stone of body fat.

Mr Client has been training hard for a year or so. He had grown a good amount of strong muscle but kept hold of a good amount of stored fat. He changed his diet to whole nutritious foods and over 5 months has dropped nearly 10% body fat and had to buy a new suit.. Twice.

Miss/Mr Yoyo Dieter eats whole nutritious food for a week, exercises like mad, steps on the scales and hasn’t lost a pound. Gives up, grabs the chocolate and googles the next fad to try.

Focusing on the number on the scales is setting yourself up for failure. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I have heard “my clothes are feeling looser but the scales haven’t gone down so I’ve; gone back on the X diet/stopped eating as many calories/cut out the healthy fat.”

Quite honestly, sometimes I feel that banging my head against a brick wall would be more productive.

So when someone says to you “I’ve lost 7lb in a week!”
Instead of thinking “Wow, I need to try this!”

You should be thinking “How many dress sizes have you dropped? And would doing it the right way be less painful in the long run.” – It can be fun once you start making progress and realise how strong your really are!

Be patient, put in the work and trust the process. If you hired a trainer, listen and act on their advice. And for god sake eat some dietary fats!!

You WILL see results!

* vital macronurients – protein and dietary fat. Carbohydrates are not vital. Our bodies can survive without/with very little carbohydrates, although advice should be taken from a trained professionalif doing so.

I wanted to write a quick post on a topic I am asked about on a regular basis.

Second to the ‘Big Carb Lie’ I feel this is the biggest misconception in the ‘diet’ world. Of course I am talking about artificial sweeteners and fats. You know yourself if you are a marketing sheep. I apologise for calling you sheep, I honestly do not blame you for getting suckered in to the ‘low-fat’ ‘low-calorie’ ‘sugar-free’ tornado that is tearing through our society. Everywhere you look there is Light this, Low that and Fat Free butter. Guess what Einstein..BUTTER IS FAT!! And a healthy source of fat also (clarified and grass-fed preferably). Now I know it is hard to believe that the media could lie so outright. Like Beyonce’s Booty really doesn’t have any cellulite, or Cheryl Cole really uses L’oreal home hair dye kit.. of course the media doesn’t lie.

Now I’ve got that off my chest let’s get into the comment I hear most frequently on this subject.. “If these artificial additives are so bad, why are they on our shelves and promoted as good for you?’ The answer to that is simple, and the same for every single fad diet pill, drop, shake, sugar alternative. They have paid out a lot of money to be there! These chemical formulas have been created by the manufacturer and tested rigorously by doctors and food standard bodies, all of which are paid for by… the manufacturer! Every single experiment will have been picked away at to find the part which suit them and will sell the products. We will look into the main offender, but just remember that are all as bad as each other and should never be a part of our diet. So, Aspartame. It took 16 years to get aspartame approved for production. The data provided by the manufacturers of aspartame was so flawed that there was a criminal prosecution against them by the FDA. It is the most studied product on the market in history and the only reason, I believe, it is still on the market today is due to lack of time, in 20-30 years when the long term effects of a lifetime of aspartame poisoning is evident I am positive it will be illegal. Listen to this.. a 74 body study carried out by the manufacturers of aspartame found 100% showed no side effects from consuming aspartame. A study from an independent body tested 90 people and a massive 90% showed negative side effects to aspartame poisoning from headaches to migraines to seizures and more.

I could go on forever about how while testing on rats the manufacturers would feed little bits of aspartame to the control group of rats to try and cover up the dramatic seizures and cancers these rats were growing, or how rats were reported as alive with no side effects when they were actually dead, or how when liquid aspartame is stored in temperatures above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, it breaks down into DKP and formaldehyde, both of which are known toxins. But the real topic I want to cover in this post is the psychological effects of eating fat free sugar free foods and drinks.

Aspartame is 180 times sweeter than sugar and yet has NO calories.Now, my guess is that if you do buy these diet products, you are probably conscious about your weight and want to do what you can to stay/get into shape, so you would think these products are great. WRONG! All they will achieve is making your weight loss/maintenance a million times harder for a few reasons;

As aspartame (and similar products) are so much sweeter than sugar they produce a seriously unnatural hormone response. Firstly the suppression of serotonin. Once consumed aspartame heads straight for the brain and the phenylalanine disrupts serotonin levels, thus suppressing/blocking the feeling of fullness and stimulating the hunger and food cravings. Secondly the massive release of insulin and leptin hormones (similar to any sugar consumption) then tell your body to store more fat. So not only are you ready to store whatever goes in, you are starting a huge bitch fight between your brain and another 20 cupcakes, which, lets be honest, the cake will probably win, because even if you have 100 sugar free cakes, as far as your brain is concerned, you have still not satisfied its sugar craving.
Not only does aspartame make the cravings even more irresistible, they make even healthy choices taste bland. If your taste buds are used to 180x the sweetness of sugar you will never be able to appreciate the delicious sweetness from a strawberry or apple, the real sweet food we should be treating ourselves to.
The same goes for full fat or low fat dairy, butter over margarine (aka spreadable plastic) and anything else under the ‘diet food’ umbrella.You need to address your issues with sugar and break the ties you have. Opting for the low calorie alternative is not going to make your life easier. See my previous post about carbohydrates to delve deeper into the sugar demons.

To start this post I need to take you back to the Paleolithic Period, around 10,000BC. This was the end of the ice age and the first trace of human existence. Humans survived and developed existing solely on hunting mammals and naturally grown vegetation, such as vegetables, nuts, seeds and berries. Not only did we survive, we flourished! Reproducing rapidly, learning quickly and developing new skills. We survived off the land, moving from place to place following food sources, until around 8000BC when cultivation of wheat began to spread. The early Egyptians were the first to develop the use of baking the wheat and creating bread. The cultivation of grains meant one thing; stability. Now humans could create their own food from the land, instead of roaming the land for food. They could settle in one place, a few square miles supporting hundreds of people instead of a hand-full. They could build, adapt and develop.

You see, I am not saying refined carbs are the devil. They had their purposes, to feed thousands more people than game and vegetation could do alone. I’m not about to tell a starving Ethiopian child to stop eating his rice because it is bad for him. However, the point I hope to make today, is that in our modern society, in countries where fresh nourishing food sources are readily available, refined carbohydrates are not only unnecessary, but highly dangerous in the levels we consume them and are the main cause of the obesity epidemic we are struggling to keep up with today.

For those that are unsure ‘refined carbohydrates’ are complex starchy carbs, your pastas, breads, rices and starchy vegetables like potatoes. Anything containing any form of grains or corn. They are packed full of refined carbohydrates and are completely nutritionally useless! Then what about my 50% energy allowance for carbs, which is the main energy system my body functions on? Well what if I told you you can get all the carbohydrate energy your body needs from Complex Fibrous Carbohydrates? That is, any vegetable. A little side note.. corn is NOT a vegetable. It is a man made CORN. Not vegetable.

We are all born with the same DNA as our paleolithic ancestors. Less than 1/10th of 1% of our genes have changed in the last 10,000 years. We are born already adapted to survive off of the land, and then we mess it all up. From an early age we are introduced to refined carbs and our bodies begin to rely on them, crave them more and more, and now we have an obesity epidemic on our hands with heart disease, type two diabetes, strokes and high blood pressure continuously increasing. However, ALL IS NOT LOST! As quickly as our bodies can adapt to ‘need’ and crave for refined carbs, we can adapt to not need them. Over the course of a few weeks of changing to a refined carb free diet we can actually reprogram our genes from deriving most of our energy from fat instead of carbohydrate. (I will get on to the importance of healthy fat in our diet in a future post.) Not only do we switch to burning fat, but the effects of eating refined carbs work against our bodies, making us tired, agitated and depressed, which by the way, it already does. We are just accustomed to the feelings and pop any pill the doctor prescribes to numb the effects.

Now you have the basic idea of how our bodies can benefit from cutting refined carbs from our diet I will get into the science behind it all. I will try to keep it as simple as possible.

Firstly carbs are sugar. Once carbs are ingested they are broken down (metabolised) into galactose, glucose and fructose.. sugar, to be absorbed into the gut, where they make their way to the liver and are turned into glucose molecules. Refined carbs have a very high glycemic index. The glycemic index relates to the amount of insulin needed to be released to control the blood sugar levels once glucose has been absorbed into the bloodstream. The higher the glycemic index, the higher the blood sugar levels rise and the more insulin is released. This causes your body to crash, some people have a higher tolerance than others, but everyone gets it in some form. If you feel drowsy and weak in the afternoon after eating refined carbs at lunch you have a low tolerance to the insulin rush produced. You would seriously benefit from cutting your refined carb intake, particularly at lunch. Exchange the calories you would consume from refined carbs for veg, healthy fats and protein. The slow releasing energy from complex fibrous carbs, monounsaturated fat and protein will keep you fuller for longer and is packed full of the micronutrients we need for normal healthy muscle function, digestion and cardiovascular system. You will also find your craving for salty, fatty, sugary foods will fall. The more sugar you consume, the more of it you crave. Trying to diet and cut calories while still eating refined carbs will just make life horrible, you will either be constantly battling cravings and feeling rough, or giving in to the the cravings and feeling even worse. No only will you feel rubbish, you won’t be losing fat. Once the liver breaks down sugar into glucose, the excess is stored in the liver. The liver only has a small capacity for stored glucose, so once the liver has reached full capacity the excess glucose is returned to the blood in the form of triglycerides (fatty acids). These are spread out to parts of the body to be stored as fat, usual places being belly, bum, breasts and thighs. Unlike the liver, the rest of the body has no limit to the amount of fat that can be stored!

These days, by the time fresh food gets from the field, through the shops, to your house and into your system the accuracy of the nutritional value of the back is somewhat questionable. The guidelines were written when we were relying on our local green grocers/farmers market to supply our food. When food was from farm to consumer in a day, not a week. Every day that passes the nutrition in the food depletes. So it makes sense that 5 a day, should be more like 50% of your day, with healthy fat and protein making up the rest.

Whether you want to lose weight a lot of weight, shed the last few pounds, or are perfectly happy with your size but want to heal yourself from the inside, I can only recommend cutting down on your refined carb intake as much as possible. This is, in my opinion, the only way of eating that is sustainable for life and 100% healthy. No FAD, No calorie counting, No chemicals.

Naomi Bazeley

Naomi is a CrossFit Level 2 Trainer.
If you are looking for one on one coaching, nutritional advice or you are interested in getting in to CrossFit, Naomi can work with you to help you to achieve your goals.